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Merged xkcd nails the paranormal

zooterkin said:
I suggest you read the column headings again.
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English is not my first language (nowadays not even my second...), but I read it as the companies providing the dowsing etc. would be making a killing if it worked, not necessarily the companies using it.
The text from the mouseover (xkcd's jokes should not be read out of the context of the mouseovers): Not to be confused with 'making money selling this stuff to OTHER people who think it works', which corporate accountants and actuaries have zero problems with.

p.s. Not in response to Zooterkin's (quoted) posts.
 
Shrike said:
English is not my first language (nowadays not even my second...), but I read it as the companies providing the dowsing etc. would be making a killing if it worked, not necessarily the companies using it.
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I believe you've read it wrong, since the wording is "If it worked, companies would be using it to make a killing in...". Simply selling it to people who believe it works is covered by the mouseover.
 
zooterkin said:
I suggest you read the column headings again.
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I read it... if you ask the managers who are accountable for deploying these paranormal practices, they'll say it's because they make the company money.

Again: dowsers in the oilpatch. They're hired because the speculators who hire them are convinced it gives them a good economic benefit.

That's the tragedy of confirmation bias: remember the hits; forget the misses. Groupthink and 'good money after bad' fallacy also come into play with post-hoc rationalizations for money spent. They shop around for even a shred of evidence that it was a good investment after all.
 
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blutoski said:
I read it... if you ask the managers who are accountable for deploying these paranormal practices, they'll say it's because they make the company money.

Again: dowsers in the oilpatch. They're hired because the speculators who hire them are convinced it gives them a good economic benefit.
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The point remains; whatever they think they are doing, the people deploying the practices are not actually making a killing by using them.

I hate over-analysing jokes, but I think Randall Munroe has chosen his words carefully, and the meaning seems quite clear to me, which is why I find it surprising that some people seem to read it the opposite way.
 
zooterkin said:
The point remains; whatever they think they are doing, the people deploying the practices are not actually making a killing by using them.

I hate over-analysing jokes, but I think Randall Munroe has chosen his words carefully, and the meaning seems quite clear to me, which is why I find it surprising that some people seem to read it the opposite way.
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It's Munroe's fault for not including a reply to every possible objection there could possibly to that cartoon.
 
CORed said:
In other words, these abilities exist, but their existence is indistinguishable from nonexistence.
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If the effects of the existence of an ability is indistinguishable from the effects of the non-existence of the same ability, then it is safe to conclude that the ability itself does not exist.
 
zooterkin said:
The point remains; whatever they think they are doing, the people deploying the practices are not actually making a killing by using them.

I hate over-analysing jokes, but I think Randall Munroe has chosen his words carefully, and the meaning seems quite clear to me, which is why I find it surprising that some people seem to read it the opposite way.
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I'm not sure that I'm so concerned about the wording than I am about the strawperson argument. I'm not sure it would be true that every emerging technology would be profitable today.

100 years ago, somebody would say that physicists were wrong about chain reactions because no business made money from nuclear power generation. A reasonable counterargument would have been that more investment is required in monetizing the science.

My impression is that paranormalists have been sitting on that lame story for about 30 years, but the point remains that they're not claiming psi is available on demand for commerce today.
 
Gawdzilla said:
It's Munroe's fault for not including a reply to every possible objection there could possibly to that cartoon.
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(shrug) - if it was a creationist cartoon with a strawperson argument, we'd probably be laughing at it.

My personal approach is that the claims of fellow skeptics are not exempt from critical examination.
 
blutoski said:
My impression is that paranormalists have been sitting on that lame story for about 30 years, but the point remains that they're not claiming psi is available on demand for commerce today.
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Where does 30 years come from? Most of the items on the list have been around for a lot longer than that, and at least some are claimed to have real and reliable effects, dowsing and homoeopathy, to name but two.
 
zooterkin said:
Where does 30 years come from? Most of the items on the list have been around for a lot longer than that, and at least some are claimed to have real and reliable effects, dowsing and homoeopathy, to name but two.
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I probably didn't phrase that well.

I was referring to the 'lame story' that there's a conspiracy to suppress research funding despite scientifically validated proof of concept.

They're trying to explain why a good idea isn't getting developed by private or public funding. My impression from reading the literature going back at least 200 years now is that this is a relatively new argument.
 
I apologise if this comes across as an idee fixe, but it's important to point out that an argument from current business practices is a pretty classic logical fallacy.

There's an illustrative joke that goes like this:

Skeptic: "Hey, that's a $50 laying there on the ground."
Economist: "No it isn't - somebody would have picked it up by now."
 
Actually, I think it's a pretty classic reductio ad absurdum, rather than anything needing a new name. If X were true, then Y would happen, and Y is clearly false.

I've seen your objections, and frankly, I think they miss the mark.

E.g., "100 years ago, somebody would say that physicists were wrong about chain reactions because no business made money from nuclear power generation. A reasonable counterargument would have been that more investment is required in monetizing the science." fails to be even analogous at all, because as you note there simply wasn't any money to be mad in it. That "X => Y" just fails to be there, so, yes, big surprise that the ad absurdum doesn't work there ;)

By comparison all those paranormal scams are presented as working and producing useful results right here and now. E.g., dowsers don't ask you to put money into more research to maybe one day actually make it actually detect anything, they promise a detection that works here and now. E.g., aura readers don't ask for funding to eventually develop it into a diagnostic method that actually works at all, they promise you an accurate diagnostic here and now. Etc.

If in 1910 someone were to claim that a nuclear reactor exists that produces hundreds of megawatts for almost no cost, and furthermore that it has existed for decades, then yes you'd be perfectly entitled to ask where are the companies getting rich with that.

Do you understand that crucial distinction? When someone promises something that works here and now, you are perfectly entitled to build an ad absurdum boiling down to "what would happen if it worked here and now, and is that conclusion true?"
 
HansMustermann said:
Actually, I think it's a pretty classic reductio ad absurdum, rather than anything needing a new name. If X were true, then Y would happen, and Y is clearly false.

I've seen your objections, and frankly, I think they miss the mark.

E.g., "100 years ago, somebody would say that physicists were wrong about chain reactions because no business made money from nuclear power generation. A reasonable counterargument would have been that more investment is required in monetizing the science." fails to be even analogous at all, because as you note there simply wasn't any money to be mad in it. That "X => Y" just fails to be there, so, yes, big surprise that the ad absurdum doesn't work there ;)
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Agreed. It's probably true that nuclear power has never made money. ie: nobody's made a killing generating nuclear power. But nobody claims economic failure is evidence that nuclear power is junk science.




HansMustermann said:
By comparison all those paranormal scams are presented as working and producing useful results right here and now. E.g., dowsers don't ask you to put money into more research to maybe one day actually make it actually detect anything, they promise a detection that works here and now. E.g., aura readers don't ask for funding to eventually develop it into a diagnostic method that actually works at all, they promise you an accurate diagnostic here and now. Etc.
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Some do, which is who I'm specifically talking about.
Much of the funding in the 1970s was provided as public/private grants. Targ&Puthoff got something like the equivalent of half a million 2010 $USD to operate their labs.

T&P would be the first to say that these mediums and dowsers are probably frauds.



HansMustermann said:
If in 1910 someone were to claim that a nuclear reactor exists that produces hundreds of megawatts for almost no cost, and furthermore that it has existed for decades, then yes you'd be perfectly entitled to ask where are the companies getting rich with that.

Do you understand that crucial distinction? When someone promises something that works here and now, you are perfectly entitled to build an ad absurdum boiling down to "what would happen if it worked here and now, and is that conclusion true?"
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No, I don't understand your distinction. Fraud always coexists with legitemate science. There are people selling quack medical remedies, alongside people genuinely involved in developing new medical technologies. Stem cells would be a good analogy:

  • there are quacks selling stem cell cures, even though they haven't been proven to work yet (boo, hiss)
  • there are legitemate scientists developing these technologies with research budgets (socially acceptable - oh, except in the US apparently)
  • there is no business currently making a killing selling these technologies (they're emerging and have potential)

Compare to the psi adovocacy claims:

  • there are quacks selling psi/dowsing/&c, even though they haven't been proven to work yet (boo, hiss)
  • there are very few scientists developing these technologies because nobody takes them seriously (social prejudice)
  • there is no business currently making a killing selling these technologies (they're emerging and have potential)
 
But the people doing genuine research don't go promise that a $5 pill will cure your illness and replace that lifetime treatment for, say, diabetes, before actually testing it.

What you're trying to present there as equivalent, and more than once is (A) some guy selling a miracle solution as working _now_, and (B) someone doing research. I don't see how that's equivalent at all.

The distinction is that what they actually claim, not some vague analogies and unrelated other things, would add up to someone making a killing if it actually worked. Yes, some other things may not add up, but the actual claims used in some of these scams do. And really where are the companies that do?

To use your silly joke, if I see a $100 note on the sidewalk _now_, ok, I can believe it just fell. But if someone were to tell me that a $100 note has been under a bench in the park for 30 years, then exactly that economist's objection would apply. Someone _would_ have taken it.

E.g., if graphology or numerology actually worked, and I mean as a predictor of job performance and not just as a way to drop a random 90% of the resumes for peons without being sued for discrimination, then someone out there wouldn't just use it to drop resumes. Someone would go through a handwriting analysis of everyone who just graduated some community colleges (and is probably very cheap to hire), make the right ones a good offer and be the next Google.

Or heck, we would see it used not just for peons, but someone would also use it to hire their next CFO or VP of Marketing. Just go through a few fresh and cheap MBA graduates, find the one destined to greatness, and let him make you a billion dollars. Where are the actual examples of that?

Or if almost everyone is doing it, where is the correlation between failures and not doing it? Then you'd see some companies who use graphology and at least get by, and everyone who thought it was baloney get pushed out of the market. Where is that correlation?
 
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